Whilst living in China I read about a woman who, after being made redundant from her state job, decided to vent her anger by writing anti-Government slogans on banknotes. Her actions, perhaps inevitably, led to incarceration in a labour camp in the far Western province of Xinjiang. She died there three weeks later under mysterious circumstances.
With this in mind, I decided to investigate just how easy it was to become a dissident in modern day China, and what better way to do so than to deface some of the ubiquitous Chairman Mao portraits found on most Chinese banknotes?
I'm not sure how other, more hardcore, Chinese dissidents conducted their campaigns against the State, but I'm pretty sure they weren't sat in their apartment with a bottle of Tsing Tao and a ball point pen giggling like a little girl. Anyway, here's what I came up with.
I've convinced myself that the reason I didn't put the defaced banknotes back into circulation was that I wanted to keep them for posterity, but really I was just shit-scared of Secret Police.
WORDS AND BANKNOTES IMAGE BY CRAIG NUNN
PHOTOGRAPH BY PICKEREL YEE
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